The Internet is a decentralized network of computers that can communicate with one another via a transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP). Although the Internet has its origins in a network created by Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in the 1960's, it has only recently become a worldwide communication medium. To a large extent, the explosive growth in use of the Internet is due to the development in the early 1990's of the worldwide Web (WWW), which is one of several service facilities provided on the Internet. Other facilities include a variety of communication services such as electronic mail, telnet, usenet newsgroups, internet relay chat (IRC),a variety of information retrieval services such as FTP (file transfer protocol) and Gopher. The WWW is a client-server based facility that includes a number of servers (computers connected to the Internet) on which Web pages or files reside, as well as clients (Web browsers) which interface the users with the Web pages. Specifically, Web browsers and software applications such as Communicator (trademark of Netscape Communication Corporation) send a request over the WWW to a server requesting a web page identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which notes both the server where the Web page resides and the file or files on the server which makes up the Web page. The server then sends a copy of the requested file(s) to the Web browser, which in turn displays the Web page to the user.
The Web pages on the WWW may be hyper-media documents written in a standardized language called HyperText Markup Language (HTML). A typical Web page includes text together with embedded formatting commands, referred to as tags, which can be used to control font size, font style and the like. A Web browser parses the HTML script in order to display the text in accordance with the specified format.
The widely distributed nature of the Internet as well as other currently popular distributed computing environments such as intranets (scaled versions of the Internet providing communications bounded by a firewall typically within a business entity) has enabled the provision of information or content to an ever broadening user-base. Concomitantly, the need has developed for managing this extensive user connectivity. In particular, it has been increasingly difficult for content providers to provide servers having the connectivity capacity required to fulfill concurrent requests from numerous client computers in a reasonable time period. Additionally, graphical content, while extremely powerful in its ability to convey information to a client, typically comprises large amounts of data and the communication of this data presents challenges with respect to processor resource at the server.
Often the information sought by clients in a distributed computing environment resides in restricted or secured databases which may require special access codes or special seat licenses for access to the data therein. Content providers have been challenged to provide controlled and authenticated access to these secure repositories in such a manner as to be transparent to the client computer while still ensuring the security of the data therein.
Connectivity management in a distributed computing environment is often more important than the quality of the information provided by the server owner. Many servers owners have lost clients based upon their failure to address such issues.
Historically such connectivity and processor resource issues have been addressed by augmenting the base hardware at the server owner's location. Server owners are continually upgrading their computer systems to ensure that clients are provided with timely access to meaningful content. Of course this solution does not ensure complete content access and requires perpetual and expanding expenditures on the part of the server owner. Moreover, this solution fails to address problems created by the need to occasionally provide event-based server sites which are in heavy client demand such as the web-based tracking of the Olympic games or the recent Mars exploration expedition by NASA. Security authentication management has been treated in a number of different ways including, the use encryption techniques which may require additional software for the client and the use of secure passwords for access to particular pieces of information, however the maintenance of these secure systems and passwords has varied widely. For example, in some "secure" Web-sites the user's password which gives a client the ability to access private data is stored in a local file on a client's computer (also referred to as a "cookie"). This file may be copied from the clients computer thereby enabling third parties to access the secure information.